"I'm a small Asian girl," I reply.
"Oh, really?" he says. I know that tone of voice, because I've heard it before. The American subconscious is pretty blatant when it comes to perverse male fantasies. I'm right up there along with leggy Latin girls, hot twins and threesomes with your girlfriend's best friend.
Wood, whose last name is so fitting that it's almost unbelievable, has made a minor rock career with his band Shat by broaching such dude-worthy subjects. The New Jersey-based musician has spent the last half of his life writing silly love songs about what his bio describes as the "more choice pieces of female anatomy."
"Like ŒI Threw Up on Her Cunt'-- that's a true story," he tells me. "I love to eat pussy. I fucking went down on this chick, and she didn't take care of herself. Her cunt smelled so bad I couldn't help it. I had a lot to drink that night, and I accidentally threw up on her cunt."
Shat's lengthy discography is filled with such vulgarities, as well as more mundane everyday experiences like the ones detailed in "I Stepped in Shit." All the lyrics are written by Wood, whose own life is a Behind the Music saga full of celebrity sightings, illicit drug use and gangland-style shootings. His life stories are well-worn, often related with an unabashed familiarity. He tells them as if prompted, but with a childlike enthusiasm that makes it feel as if you're hearing them for the first time.
There's the one about when he got a cease-and-desist letter from Britney Spears's lawyers for using her likeness on the cover of Shat's self-released album Cunt-Flavored Lollipops. Or the one about Shat being on tour with Dillinger Escape Plan in Europe and not being allowed to open at an all-ages show. Which, as the promoter had to sorely deal with later, resulted in a crude spectacle outside the venue with Wood enticing a girl to urinate on him. Oh, yeah, and then there's the story of the stray bullet that's still lodged in Wood's head.
It was 1992, and Wood was living in California. He had moved out there with his then-band Pitch Black and also to attend the Grove School of Music in Van Nuys. In a sixteen-page handwritten self-interview on Shat's website, Wood describes the night he almost died: "We used to go to a lot of after-hours parties, and we went to one on Hollywood and Vine in Hollywood to check out some bands, promote a show we had coming up and pick up chicks.... When everyone else was leaving at like 5 a.m., some dude in a window on top of the warehouse, in one of the apartments, was shooting at everyone. I remember the bullets ricocheting off the ground and everyone running and taking cover.
"We waited awhile, and me and my friend left when everything seemed calm," he continues. "We got in my van after I got this mint chick's phone number, and I pulled out of the spot I was parked in right in front of the building. The next thing I remember was waking up after smashing into an apartment building. My friend said we pulled out and I was shot instantly.... Next thing I remember was a cop telling me to run out of my van toward his car and the ambulance as his gun was drawn and aimed up in the air and helicopters flying overhead."
Wood spent two weeks at a Los Angeles hospital and the following month back home in Jersey for rehabilitation.
"When I first got out of the hospital," he says, "if you pointed at a lamp and were like, 'What's that?' I couldn't tell you what a fucking lamp was. I knew what it was, but I couldn't say it."
He eventually regained his memory, and most of his motor functions remained intact except, he says, for his eyesight. He still has no peripheral vision. After his recovery, Wood returned to the West Coast to continue his life, but things had begun unraveling in his absence. Two of the guys in Pitch Black weren't really getting along anymore, and Wood himself had started to grow tired of the band. His indifference was partly prompted by Mind Eraser, a hometown act that he had discovered while in treatment.
"They were an instrumental speedcore jazz trio," he says. "I could not believe what I saw when they played. It was the most ridiculous, best thing I had ever seen. I didn't tell them, but I knew I was gonna sing for them. Or at least try."
"It was so hard telling the guys in Pitch Black that I was leaving," he adds. "But I did, and flew back to Jersey and tried out for Mind Eraser the next day."
Wood impressed the outfit with his vocal ability and by throwing his stout body against the rehearsal room wall and then dragging his head across the floor with his legs flailing behind him. "They knew then that I was the guy," Wood jokes.
Mind Eraser lasted only about two years and broke up in 1996. But in that short time, the group had influenced a throng of wide-eyed youth, including a high-school student named Ben Weinman, who later went on to form Dillinger Escape Plan.
"We were so far ahead of ourselves, the labels just weren't biting, you know?" Wood laments. "We were doing shit like Dillinger Escape Plan before anybody was doing it."
"When I see how [Ben] took what we were doing and carried it on to even form a more advanced beast," he concludes, "it helps me deal with the facts that I have to face -- what could have been the best music ever heard."
Weinman certainly took note, and years later, when Dillinger found itself short a bassist, he dialed up his old friend. Wood was only supposed to fill in for a few shows until the group could hire a permanent replacement, but he ended up touring with the band for a year and a half. It was great, he says, until he got fired.
"I missed a show this one time because I was banging this chick and her alarm didn't go off, so we couldn't make the show, and they were fucking pissed," he explains. "And I didn't play with a pick, and they wanted someone to play with a pick. They threw all kinds of reasons at me. The bottom line is that I didn't fit in with the guys. I'm just this big fat dude, you know what I mean?"
Afterward, Wood started putting music to lyrics that he had been writing while on tour with Dillinger. They were simple songs, mostly choruses, about his life and sexual escapades. Wood hired some friends to make up the live band, which he dubbed Shat, and started playing out as much as his seasonal job in lawn care would allow him.
The live act was standard fare at first, but later, egged on by his friends, Wood decided to escalate his performance to the same level of raunchiness that was expected of the music. And so he bought some dildos and made an elaborate costume for himself, including a dildo Mohawk cleverly attached to a black helmet. Shat's testosterone-fueled sets have prompted a horde of naysayers to label Wood as nothing more than a shock-rock male chauvinist. But he doesn't see it that way.
"I make fun of everyone else as much as I make fun of myself," he points out. "I'll sing a song about a chick that has small tits, but I'll fucking make fun of my small dick and balls throughout the whole set in the same breath."
"If I hated women," declares Wood, who attests to having a serious girlfriend, "I'd be talking about fucking dudes and banging dudes in the ass. I fucking love women! It's weird how people take it the wrong way -- and a lot of girls do -- but then the same amount of girls get it, you know? If it wasn't for women, Shat wouldn't fucking even exist."
